Unbound (9 page)

It might come to that, if I couldn’t save her. If I couldn’t pry Meridiana out of her mind. But I intended to make damn sure that was a last resort.

I sat down on the hillside and pulled the suit over my legs. Following Mahefa’s lead, I didn’t worry about removing my shoes. The material felt like heavy satin. It clung to my jeans, outlining every fold and wrinkle. A pair of thin silver canisters on the back presumably held my air. There were no gauges to verify whether they were full.

Mahefa was already sealing the front of his suit, using a zipper-like tab that left no visible seam. The plastic bubble hung down behind him like a sweatshirt hood. These suits were far simpler and more maneuverable than anything NASA had. I imagined most astronauts would kill for something like this . . . assuming they worked.

Mahefa opened a second cooler in the back of the car and pulled out a plastic packet of blood, the kind of thing you might find hanging from an IV stand in a hospital. He jabbed a metal straw into the top and sucked it down like a child’s juice box.

I started to seal my suit, then changed my mind. This thing had no built-in plumbing, and I had no idea how long our flight would be. I hiked to the base of the bridge to relieve myself. When I finished, I glanced back to make sure Mahefa wasn’t paying attention, then tucked my shock-gun into the bag, along with the laminated list.

He tossed the empty pouch onto the ground, strapped on an oversized harness, and slammed the BMW’s trunk shut. “You ready?”

I thought about Jeneta, about the hate and hunger I had sensed from Meridiana and her minions, and about my friends
and neighbors who had died without understanding why. With a sigh, I stepped into the harness.

Mahefa might be an ass, but he was all business as he cinched the straps around my chest, shoulders, and thighs. Heavy steel rings locked us together like tandem skydivers, my back to his front. I resisted the urge to seal my helmet to block the foulness of his breath. “How long does the blood last?”

“Depends. The stuff I downed should be enough to get us there and back. The kind you’ll be stealing will give you several hours of talking to the dead.” He wrapped his arms around my chest. “Relax. Flying is as easy as falling, only backward.”

Before I could stammer a response, he jumped hard enough to make me bite my tongue. I spat blood and gripped his arms, trying to stop the pressure of the harness from cutting off the circulation to my legs. I had no clue how fast we were accelerating. The average human being passed out around five gees, and I could feel the blood in my body draining downward. I clenched my muscles and tried to hold on.

“It will take a few minutes to escape the atmosphere,” he shouted. “I’ll let you know when to seal your helmet.”

For as long as I could remember, I’d had nightmares about tumbling out of airplanes, off cliff sides, or over the edge of the Mackinac Bridge. This was worse. I was falling
away
from the Earth, significantly faster than terminal velocity. The wind dried my eyes and tore the breath from my mouth.

Already the air was getting colder. When I looked down, I could make out the outlines of the Great Lakes, the mitten and rabbit shapes of Michigan’s lower and upper peninsulas. My neck cramped, and my jaw was clenched so tightly I expected my teeth to shatter.

“If you need to puke, do it
before
you close your helmet,” Mahefa yelled.

The Earth’s curve was clearly visible, which would have been awe-inspiring if I had been looking at a photograph from the safety of my desk. Shadows stained my vision, congealing
from the edges. Passing out might be a blessing, but I had no faith that Mahefa would bother to seal my helmet.

We were through the upper clouds now. The sun was brighter, and when I wrenched my head up, I could just begin to make out the stars overhead.

Mahefa let go.

I shouted and clawed at his arms as the harness took my full weight. My fingers were numb, little more than useless stubs.

“Helmet,” he yelled, his voice tinny.

I fumbled to pull the clear bubble over my head. After three attempts, Mahefa snatched it from between us and yanked it into place. He grabbed a tab at the collar and pulled it around my neck. I heard hissing, and the bubble expanded, filling with cold, stale air.

The plastic wasn’t as clear as I had thought, or perhaps it was designed to polarize in direct sunlight. The world below took on a smoky tint.

“Radio check.” Mahefa’s words crackled through a speaker by my neck. “You done screaming yet?”

My suit bulged outward. Rings of stiffer fabric kept it from bubbling too much. I looked like a shiny Michelin Man. I forced myself to breathe slowly. “Yah. Starting to hate you a lot, though.”

I tried to distract myself by figuring out the physics of our magical flight. There was no visible propulsion—at least, I was 99 percent certain Mahefa wasn’t somehow shooting rocket exhaust out of his ass. The state of my stomach meant his vampiric blood-magic hadn’t completely excused us from the normal rules of acceleration and momentum.

How much energy did it take to fly the two of us at this rate? Call it 350 pounds total, guesstimate our speed at several hundred miles per hour and climbing . . . by my off-the-cuff calculations, we should have caught fire five minutes ago.

One way or another, movement obeyed Newton’s Third Law. Mahefa could fly upward by basically jumping off the Earth, but how could he change directions, especially once we
reached the vacuum of space? What was he pushing against? Everything in the solar system was chained to the sun’s gravitational pull, but gravity was a relatively weak force for the speed and power of this flight. On the other hand, once you escaped Earth’s atmosphere and gravity, you should need far less energy to maneuver.

With adequate blood supplies, could we send a vampire out to explore Jupiter?

That thought summoned a new fear.
What if somebody already had?

“Hold on,” Mahefa said over the radio. “Let me get my bearings.”

We coasted higher, rotating at a slow speed that was perfect for inducing vomiting. I tried to focus on the sun, using it as a fixed—if moderately blinding—point on the horizon. My inner ear kept trying to tell me I was falling in every direction at once.

The cold was unpleasant, but no worse than a typical November morning in the U. P. I gripped the harness straps and waited.

“We’re early,” he said. “You’re lighter than I expected. Looks like we made better time.”

We sped higher, angling away from the sun. The stars were so much sharper than I was used to, without the Earth’s atmosphere to distort their light and color. I tried to engrave the sight in my memory for later, when I might be able to appreciate it.

“There we are.” Mahefa changed course again, moving slower this time.

We headed for a rectangular shadow that blotted the stars from view. “All this needs is
Also sprach Zarathustra
playing in the background,” I muttered.

“What’s that?”

“Nothing.” Save the
2001: A Space Odyssey
reference for someone who might appreciate it.

The orbiting blood bank made me think of a stealth bomber.
The skin was matte black, and the closer we got, the more I could make out the irregular angles of its surface. It seemed to hang motionless in the darkness, hiding in the edge of the Earth’s shadow.

Before I realized what was happening, Mahefa unbuckled the harness holding us together. I tried to twist around, but he slipped free before I could grab him.

My efforts had started me rotating. I spread out my arms and forced myself not to panic. Slowly, my body and brain realized I wasn’t plummeting to my death. Though given our current vector, the Earth’s gravity would pull me back down eventually, which meant I
was
plummeting. I was just plummeting very, very slowly.

I brought my arms in, and my body spun faster. I extended my legs, testing how each change affected my movement. I slowly stretched out both arms and pinwheeled them backward, trying to visualize the different angles and their effects in a frictionless environment.

“Your maneuvering jets.” Mahefa caught my shoulder and handed me the two fire extinguishers from his backpack. “Don’t overdo it. Your instincts will make you overreact. A little thrust goes a long way up here.”

I took one extinguisher in each hand. Mahefa pulled the pins and tossed them aside. They tumbled end over end until they vanished from sight.

“Once you reach the satellite, plug the card into the console by the door. There’s no air inside, so do
not
remove your helmet. The computer system should come up automatically.” He seized my harness. “You have the list?”

“Yes.”

“Gather everything on that list, then get the hell out of there and jump toward me. You get your long-distance phone call to your dead pope. I get my new vintages. Everybody wins.”

I raised the extinguisher in my right hand, lining it up on a path that should take me to the satellite.

“Save your fuel until you need it.” Mahefa spun me around and gripped the back of my harness. Before I could react, he hefted me overhead like a javelin and hurled me at the distant satellite.

My muscles went utterly rigid, as if the cold of space had turned my body to ice. My mind was little better, stuck on an infinitely repeating loop of
oh shit oh shit oh shit
. Then my radio crackled, breaking the spell.

“Veer up and to the right, or you’re going to miss it.”

I positioned the extinguisher in my left hand and gently squeezed the handle. Mahefa was right about the thrust. A split-second burst corrected my course and started me rotating backward like a slow-motion boomerang.

“A little higher. There you go.”

I did my best to stay on target and minimize my body’s excess motion. Half of my corrections made things worse, but I managed to keep the satellite in sight.

I was glad I had left Smudge behind. He might have enjoyed zero gravity, but he had a severe phobia when it came to fire extinguishers.

I guessed that our flight into space had covered at least a thousand miles, but these last hundred meters seemed to stretch out the longest. My hands cramped from holding the extinguishers. Sweat burned my eyes, and I had no way of wiping them. My jaw and neck were locked like rusted steel.

One moment I was flying through space. The next, my brain rebooted my perspective, and I was falling headfirst toward a satellite the size of a semi-truck trailer. At this speed, I’d bounce like a basketball, breaking who knew how many bones in the process. I brought both fire extinguishers around and tried to slow my approach.

It wasn’t enough. My left arm struck the satellite first, hard enough to bruise the elbow. The satellite’s black skin felt like brick. One of the fire extinguishers bounced from my grip and tumbled free.

Mahefa’s voice blasted my ears. “Watch it! You screw up and get stuck out there, I can’t come save you.”

I used my remaining extinguisher to shoot myself back toward the satellite at a more oblique angle. I skipped along the wall twice more before reaching the end my mind insisted on calling the bottom, as it was facing the Earth. I made my way around the corner and looked up at a black computer screen alongside the outline of a small rectangular door.

There were no handholds. Flying vampires wouldn’t need them. I floated in front of the door and pulled the bag off of my shoulder to retrieve the electronic lockpick. The interface looked like an ATM machine, with oversized plastic buttons, a curved glass screen, and a single data port.

The first time I attempted to plug the cable into the port, all I managed to do was shove myself away from the satellite. I tried not to look at the Earth stretched out beneath me. “How did they get this thing into orbit without anyone noticing the launch, anyway?”

“They carried it,” Mahefa said.

Vampires. Right.

I made my way to the console and tried again. This time, I managed to align and insert the cable without knocking myself away. The circuit board lit up, and a blinking cursor appeared on the screen. “Now what?”

“Don’t touch anything. Just cross your fingers and hope they haven’t upgraded their security.”

Seconds later, oversized text scrolled across the screen, welcoming me to Satellite Theta. The doorway—little more than an oversized doggie door, really—cracked open, and lights flickered on inside.

“Here goes.” I left the lockpick in place and squeezed inside.

Glass-fronted storage cabinets ran the length of the satellite. Orange text scrolled down the computer screen on the far side. I grabbed my list and pulled myself toward the screen.
The cabinets took up most of the space, and the remaining crawlspace was perfectly sized for inducing claustrophobia.

“Hurry up.” Mahefa sounded antsy, like a getaway driver waiting for his partner to finish robbing a bank safe.

Each sample on his shopping list was coded by wall, cabinet, tray, and position. I left the list floating in front of me and searched for the first one:
2-8-3-E4, 2007.03.18—Burtley6.

The satellite was clearly labeled and organized, at least. I turned to wall number two, slid open the glass door to cabinet eight, and pulled out the third tray. Each aluminum tray was segmented like a checkerboard, and each square held the gleaming steel hybrid of a thermos and test tube, roughly three inches in diameter. I pulled out E4. A black plastic label from an old-fashioned label maker confirmed this was the Burtley6 sample from March of 2007.

One by one I raided trays and began to fill my bag with frozen vampire blood. There was little room to maneuver, and I banged my knees and elbows repeatedly. When I was about a third of the way through the list, I noticed black smoke leaking from beneath the monitor.

My first thought was a computer failure of some sort. My second was that it would be too much of a coincidence for the computer to break down just when I was robbing the place. Though it was possible Mahefa’s hack had somehow damaged the system.

My third thought was that gas in a zero-gravity vacuum should diffuse into an ever-expanding cloud, not twist and branch out, condensing into what appeared to be a man. “Mahefa, I may have a problem here.”